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We did a planning exercise every sprint at work to see how much time people had to work on features once you removed meetings and other ceremonies, RTO, holiday
by iLoveOncall 3y ago
We did a planning exercise every sprint at work to see how much time people had to work on features once you removed meetings and other ceremonies, RTO, holidays, oncall, etc.
We were tracking that per employee.
Everything was fine for a few months and then I added a "total" column next to each row and it became apparent that we were spending close to 60% of our sprint on non-development related tasks. On 45 work-days per sprint we had something like 19 days for features.
Needless to say it shocked my manager. He's not against change thankfully but we're still evaluating what could be better alternatives.
- kevinmchugh 3y agoDo I understand correctly that you're doing nine week sprints? That sounds extremely long to me. I have to think you're spending lots of time planning work that won't be done. When you plan a sprint, how often does the work at the end of the sprint actually get completed by end of sprint? Say you plan to start the "add Foo button to Bar page" in week 7, do you actually do that? That would require some really strong estimation skills and a remarkably stable product and business environment. What's the point in the sprint where you're doing more unplanned work than planned? Or how much carry over work do you have? Because if I was trying to plan nine weeks of work, I'd get it drastically wrong, and waste tons of time planning stuff we weren't gonna do. I would make the next few sprints 4 week ones and plan to get down to 2 week sprints after the shorter pace starts to show it's strengths. Or maybe you have 9 people doing 1 week sprints and that's how you got 45 days. In which case, whoops! I have no suggestions!
- iLoveOncall 3y agoOh yeah no I meant 2 weeks sprints with a total of 45 days (ish, removing vacations) for the whole team. Sorry that wasn't clear.